The extreme downsizing of the Philadelphia Inquirer is a stand-in for what we know has been happening to newspapers across the country for the last decade. Since its bankruptcy filing in 2009 it has moved from the 526,000-square-foot Tower of Truth to a single floor in an office building.

Photographer Will Steacy has been documenting these financially difficult years for the paper, giving a unique perspective on the national downsizing and closures that are easily dismissed as just numbers.

“I wanted to create a portrait that showed the reality,” says Steacy, whose father worked at the Inquirer for 29 years.

The number of full-time media professionals in the United States is at its lowest level since 1978 (under 40,000) according to a 2013 state-of-the-media report from the Pew Research Center — the result of a number of factors, not the least of which is the shift towards digital news consumption. It’s a change that’s too big to document visually at a macro level, so Steacy has focused on just a small piece of the chaos that reflects the whole.

In some ways the photos are utterly depressing. Many focus on the banal carnage that takes place as a result of layoffs and cutbacks. On the other hand, the series is also a beautiful kind of remembrance. The series is filled with portraits of the reporters and editors who over the years helped the paper win 19 Pulitzers — the most recent in 2012 for reporting on rampant school violence. Steacy says about half the people he photographed no longer work at the paper.

The photos will resonate with anyone who’s worked in a newsroom. He shows reporters’ and editors’ desks coved in towering stacks of newspapers, notebooks, worn dictionaries, food wrappers and dry coffee cups. There are pictures of old signs scattered across the newspaper with phrases like, “Information that can’t be trusted is not less valuable; it is worthless,” and “Democracy Depends on Journalism.”

Even though Steacy says he sees himself as an outsider, he had close ties to the newspaper because of his dad. He grew up running around the newsroom and the project took a sharp personal turn when the paper laid his dad off in 2011 at the age of 64. Steacy says he had to put the project on hold because it was such a shock.

“Immediately after it happened it was just too hard to walk into that newsroom,” he says.

His father doesn’t appear in any of the photos, but Steacy says each one is a portrait of him, in a way, because the newspaper was such an important part of his dad’s life.

The project was also important to Steacy because he believes in the value of journalism. Regular people using Twitter might have helped spread the news of the Boston Marathon bombing, but the hard work of uncovering the details and documenting the ongoing drama is the job of trained journalists.

“The internet, for lack of a better metaphor, makes up the branches of the tree,” he says. “But newspapers have centuries-long traditions of being the roots of the tree. If the roots of tree rot and crumble the rest of the tree will fall with it.”